Here’s why you’ll be seeing that word a lot in the future.
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What Is A Biosimilar Drug?
Posted in biotech/medical, futurism
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2622
Already renowned for its potential to revolutionize everything from light bulbs and dental fillings through to semiconductors and motorcycle helmets, graphene can now add innate superconductivity to its repertoire. Scientists at the University of Cambridge claim to have discovered a method to trigger the superconducting properties of graphene without actually altering its chemical structure.
Light, flexible, and super-strong, the single layer of carbon atoms that makes up graphene has only been rendered superconductive previously by doping it with impurities, or by affixing it to other superconducting materials, both of which may undermine some of its other unique properties.
However, in the latest research conducted at the University of Cambridge, scientists claim to have found a way to activate superconduction in graphene by coupling it with a material known as praseodymium cerium copper oxide (Pr2− xCe xCuO4) or PCCO. PCCO is from a wider class of superconducting materials known as cuprates (derived from the Latin word for copper), known for their use in high-temperature superconductivity.
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In Brief The success of this work will help healthcare professionals diagnose more accurately and efficiently, and it will allow for more diagnostic care in areas with limited healthcare services and providers.
In early August, IBM announced that it will acquire Merge Healthcare Inc., a company that sells systems that help medical professionals access and store medical images. This move is a critical step in IBM’s plan to put AI to work medically by training its Watson software to identify maladies like heart disease and cancer.
Merge is valuable to IBM because it owns 30 billion images, including computerized tomography, X-rays, and magnetic-resonance-imaging scans. The company can use these images in its deep learning training program. IBM is hoping that the same kind of software that lets Flickr recognize your face or a dog in your photos can help Watson identify symptoms of diseases.
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I am still waiting for mine. I cannot wait to the day I use my smart lenses to take pics, videos, login to view work email, etc. BTW — I look forward to day we eliminate email too.
Google may have shelved Google Glass, its failed attempt to persuade the world that internet-connected spectacles were the next big thing, but it has not given up on the concept of smart eyeware.
The internet giant’s Verily Life Sciences unit has been working on connected contact lenses – or rather, eye implants – for some time, and Google founder Sergey Brin dropped a hint at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the technology may soon see the light of day.
Interviewed on stage at Davos, Brin said that Verily had started working on a glucose sensing contact lens project some time ago, and hinted that the first products may come to market soon.
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A team of engineers has developed a new RNA delivery technique that uses short bursts of ultrasound to efficiently deliver RNA into cells, reducing colon inflammation.
MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have demonstrated that they can deliver strands of RNA efficiently to colon cells, using bursts of ultrasound waves that propel the RNA into the cells. Using this approach, the researchers dramatically turned down the production of a protein involved in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), in mice.
“What we saw in this paper was the ultrasound can enable rapid delivery of these molecules,” says Carl Schoellhammer, a postdoc at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the study’s lead author. “In this case it was proinflammatory molecules that we were shutting off, and we saw tremendous knockdown of those proteins.”
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Eeek.
(HealthDay)—Eight people who worked at several rat-breeding facilities in Illinois and Wisconsin have been infected with a virus not commonly found in the United States, federal health officials said Friday.
This is the first known outbreak of Seoul virus associated with pet rats in the United States, although there have been several outbreaks in wild rats, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Seoul virus is a member of the Hantavirus family of rodent-borne viruses and is carried by wild Norway rats worldwide. Most rats infected with the virus do not appear sick.
Not good to hear.
(HealthDay)—For patients with unresected anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC), overall survival (OS) is poor, but radiation therapy (RT) dose is associated with improved survival, according to a study published online Dec. 27 in Cancer.
Todd A. Pezzi, from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and colleagues examined the outcomes of patients with unresected ATC who underwent no surgery or grossly incomplete resection. The authors assessed correlates of OS for 1,288 patients.
The researchers found that the median OS was 2.27 months, and 11 percent of patients were alive at one year. There was a positive correlation for RT dose and survival for the entire study cohort, for those receiving systemic therapy, and for those with stage IVA, B, and C disease. Older age, one or more comorbidities, and distant metastases correlated with OS in multivariate analyses (hazard ratios, 1.317, 1.587, and 1.385, respectively); there were also correlations for receipt of systemic therapy (hazard ratio, 0.637) and for receipt of RT versus no RT (45 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.843; 45 to 59.9 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.596; and 60 to 75 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.419). Propensity-score matching confirmed the RT dose-survival correlation for patients who received higher (60 to 75 Gy) versus lower (45 to 59.9 Gy) therapeutic doses.
A “smart” needle with an embedded camera is helping doctors perform safer brain surgery.
The device was developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide in South Australia and uses a tiny camera to identify at-risk blood vessels.
The probe, which is the size of a human hair, uses an infrared light to look through the brain.
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In Brief:
- Predictions from the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council, Melanie Walker, say we’ll soon enter a post-hospital world due to advances in personalized medicine, health monitoring, and nanotechnology.
- New and evolving technologies in medical science convince Walker we’ll live in a society not dependent on hospitals by 2030.
As the world of medicine is increasingly changed by biology, technology, communications, genetics, and robotics, predicting the outlook of the next few decades of medicine becomes harder. But that is exactly what Melanie Walker of the World Economic Forum does, and she predicts a bright new future for healthcare.
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